Site Mobile Navigation

People and Places That Innovate

INNOVATION is one of the most seductive words in the business world. It conjures up visions of bold new products and processes, entrepreneurial heroism, market leadership and big financial rewards. Small wonder, then, that the study of innovation has attracted all manner of executives, scholars, government officials and other curious observers.

In the last three decades, a spate of authors has addressed this interest — thousands of books on Amazon.com have the word “innovation” in their titles. And much of the existing literature has focused on the specific people, or groups of people, responsible for various breakthroughs. The often unacknowledged premise is that individual agency is the primary force behind effective innovation.

On the other side of the spectrum is a small but growing body of work focused on the environment — including the physical, social, technological and economic conditions — in which successful innovation occurs. The premise here is that good ideas and their successful execution are a result of connections and existing knowledge embedded in a particular context. The individual, of course, plays an important role, but it is defined more by collaboration than by solitary brilliance.

Two new books, one from each of these two perspectives, take up the gauntlet of explaining successful innovation. In “Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation” (Riverhead, $26.95), Steven Johnson focuses on what he calls “the space of innovation.” Some environments, he writes, “squelch new ideas; some environments seem to breed them effortlessly.”

As examples of innovative environments, the book — to be released early next month — offers the city and the Internet. Mr. Johnson, who has written several books on the intersection of science, technology and society, uses these innovation engines as a backdrop to analyze a “series of shared properties and patterns” that “recur again and again in unusually fertile environments.”

These seven patterns are the main dish of this rich, integrated and often sparkling book. They include the power of the slow hunch and the role of serendipity, error and inventive borrowing. The more that these patterns are embraced, the author argues, “the better we will be at tapping our extraordinary capacity for innovative thinking.”

Photo

Mr. Johnson, who knows a thing or two about the history of science, is a first-rate storyteller. He uses stories of the past to help make his point — for example, a French obstetrician who in the late 1870s conceived of an infant incubator from watching chickens hatch in a Paris zoo.

The stories also draw the reader into the inherently interconnected nature of innovation. All viable new ideas owe a great debt not only to the insights of the people who first bring them out of the ether but also to a vast body of other ideas that are circulating, often randomly, at any moment.

Given the premise that innovation thrives “when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas,” Mr. Johnson writes, it is a strange fact “that a great deal of the past two centuries of legal and folk wisdom about innovation has pursued the exact opposite argument, building walls between ideas.”

Those walls, including patents, trade secrets and protections of intellectual property, have been erected to encourage innovation. But in the interest of protecting the ownership of ideas and safeguarding their potential financial rewards, he says, these walls keep ideas sequestered, reducing the “overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem.”

Mr. Johnson argues for environments — networks, physical spaces, cultivated behaviors — that “compulsively connect and remix that most valuable of resources: information.” These spaces encompass both order and chaos, the presence of which allows ideas to emerge, collide, recombine and, above all, be broadly shared.

One turns the last pages with a pang or two. Although the author provides some scattered suggestions for encouraging good ideas, one wishes for more practical implications. The book would benefit as well from attention to innovation in fields outside the natural sciences and high tech. After all, the arts, humanities and social sciences become more important in turbulent times, so understanding successful innovation in these fields is crucial today.

Photo

In “The Innovator’s Way: Essential Practices for Successful Innovation” (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, $29.95), to be published this month, Peter J. Denning and Robert Dunham approach innovation from the more traditional perspective of individual and group action. Mr. Denning, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, and Mr. Durham, a consultant and former executive, set out to understand how individuals and organizations can raise the rate of effective innovation.

Their search takes them on a broad survey of both the existing literature and examples of successful innovation that include the creation of the World Wide Web and the founding of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

They present their conclusions straight away.

Defining innovation as “the adoption of new practice in a community,” Professor Denning and Mr. Durham lay out eight practices they deem vital to success: sensing, envisioning, offering, adopting, sustaining, executing, leading and embodying.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

For each practice, the authors explain its essence, its relationship to specific instances of effective innovation and the pitfalls one is likely to encounter in undertaking the recommended actions. They also include some homework: what to practice for each set of skills.

The book is very much a hands-on guide. Its frame is innovation, but, on a deeper level, it is concerned with effective leadership, specifically how people create and sustain change in groups.

Innovation and leadership are big, messy, important subjects. At times, it feels like the weight of both is a lot for one book to bear. The reader is left impressed by the significance of individual agency but slightly unsure of its focus and place in organizations undergoing change.

Taken together, the two books feed our interest in innovation. This attraction has only grown amid the creative destruction ushered in by the recent financial crisis. On the political, economic, environmental and even spiritual fronts, the challenges confronting our global village seem to have outstripped prevailing orthodoxy and cry out for novel solutions. Inside and outside the corner office, we are looking for new, actionable ideas that can make a positive difference.

Nancy F. Koehn is a historian at Harvard Business School.

A version of this review appears in print on September 5, 2010, on Page BU7 of the New York edition with the headline: People and Places That Innovate. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe